Social media in organizations: adaptive adjustment of rules and regulations based on comparison of intended and actual use

Contact person: Björn Kruse

During the last decades, information technology (IT) has undergone a transformation from its original purpose of information processing and decision support to a ubiquitous tool for supporting communication and (virtual) collaboration (cf. Aakhus et al. 2014, p. 1188). Social media (SM) represent this form of more ubiquitous IT artifacts that blur the relationship between material and social entities in private and increasingly professional settings (cf. Kaplan and Haenlein 2010, p. 61). In the course of user-driven diffusion, which has assumed far-reaching proportions as a social phenomenon, the organizational adoption of various internally and externally used SM platforms has also manifested itself in recent years. However, the implications of this adoption have not been fully penetrated in either theoretical or practical settings. This is due to two observations in particular: first, SMs have special characteristics that need to be taken into account in the adoption process, and second, organizational adoption of SMs occurs differently from that of IT artifacts typically introduced into organizations.

The initial use of a newly adopted IT artifact typically begins with a reflective manipulation by users. Ideally, this should be based on explicit instructions and directions. SM, however, are characterized by their emergence, since structure, content, context, and scope can be derived exclusively from the needs and activities of the users. Their potential (organizational) purpose of use is thus not ascertainable a priori, because neither definitive conclusions about their use are possible, nor can these be specified at decision-maker level (cf. Richter and Riemer 2013, pp. 195-196; Tilson, Lyytinen, and Sørensen 2010, p. 748). This makes it difficult to manage the use of SM in organizations; a task typically attributed to IT governance. In practice, one of the few effective methods for consciously steering SM has proven to be the establishment of sets of rules, so-called guidelines or policies (e.g., Krüger, Brockmann, and Stieglitz 2013, p. 2).

The design and implementation of such control approaches is usually carried out before the organizational adoption of the IT artifact. From a theoretical perspective, a large part of the adoption theory approaches established in business informatics follow this premise. After the identification of a concrete need and the subsequent requirements elicitation, a classic matching process between the intended use and the characteristics of the IT artifact is initiated. However, this sequence applies only to a limited extent to SMs, because they are often introduced into organizations "bottom-up" and without initial awareness on the part of the decision-makers. They thus alter the traditional sequence of adoption that can be mapped in a straight line and, at least in an early phase of establishment, elude strategically conscious selection by organizational decision-makers. Instead, the latter must react to unplanned adoption, resulting in a creeping loss of control over IT artifacts in real use (cf. Vaast and Kaganer 2013, p. 81; Treem and Leonardi 2012, p. 158). Employees, on the other hand, become leading drivers of the introduction of SM into organizations (cf. Treem and Leonardi 2012, p. 158).

Existing academic work on the establishment of IT governance mechanisms for organizational control of SM has so far only taken into account the form of use envisaged by decision-makers. However, the open nature of SM usage makes it necessary to compare the intended and actual usage, which can only be derived over time, in order to be able to achieve a target-oriented control effect of the rules and regulations. Therefore, the following objective was taken as a basis for the work:

To develop an approach for adaptively modifying rule sets for controlling the organizational use of SM by assigning archetypes of actual use.

This requires an approach that incorporates actual usage into the design of rulebooks in a goal-oriented manner. Three key research questions emerged for this work to realize a match between the intended form of use by decision makers and the actual use of SM over time. To map the intended use, the thesis first examined 24 organizational rulebooks on SM use from different organizations, through a qualitative content analysis.

1. Intended use: How are the rules and regulations for controlling organizational use structured by the SM?

For the survey of the actual usage, the activities of the organizations on the world's largest social network Facebook (FB), in the form of the posts made, were analyzed in a second step. For this purpose, the complete Facebook histories of the 24 organizations considered were taken as a basis in order to derive the potentials for adaptive adjustment of the rule sets - measured against the surveyed purposes of use - over all years of use.

2. Actual use: How is the organizational use of the SM shaped using the social network Facebook as an example?

Finally, a process model was presented for the adaptive adjustment of the rules and regulations, with which the adjustment of the rules and regulations can be realized through elements of actual use.

3. Coordination of usage: How must SM policies be designed in order to effectively combine the usage intended by the rules and the usage actually observed?

For a professionalized and mature approach to SM, governance requirements must be subject to adaptive change as the governing framework of the rulebooks. The lessons learned from applying an adaptive set of rules are twofold. On the one hand, on this basis, the use of SM, from the perspective of decision makers, can be guided in a desired direction. On the other hand, for the organizational users of the SM, a practicable guideline for action results in the application of the set of rules, by taking up the empirical values and the resulting learning effects of the actual use over time. In this way, a rigid set of rules that initially constrains the use of SM becomes a proactive set of rules that provides insight into different forms of use. In this way, the potential of SM for the organizations can be taken up and the uncertainties of the users in dealing with the open IT artifact 'SM' can be reduced.

Business informatics is considered to play a central role in the analysis, adoption, use and control of organizationally introduced IT artifacts. Questions concerning the course of adoption and the successful integration of IT artifacts in the organizational context correspond to a central research interest of the discipline (cf. Aral, Dellarocas, and Godes 2013, p. 3). Due to the peculiarities of the SM object of study, some special features arise for the consideration of adoption. Established adoption-theoretical approaches take a predominantly rationalist view, in which adoption is seen as a decision situation for decision makers who decide whether or not to adopt the IT artifact (cf. Riemer et al. 2012, p. 2). This position is challenged by the open-endedness of SM usage and the observation that SM is often bottom-up and without the knowledge of the decision makers, carried into the organization. In this paper, we develop a novel adoption-theoretic approach that looks at the downstream appropriation process by observing actual usage over time instead of point-in-time adoption. The resulting findings of the confluence of intended and actual usage represent a useful extension for the design of regulatory frameworks to account for the steering function and the guiding component of regulatory frameworks.

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